Good Morning, Monster: A Therapist Shares Five Heroic Stories of Emotional Recovery

by Catherine Gildiner

Overview

As seen on Good Morning America's SEPTEMBER 2020 READING LIST and FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2020!

"We need to read stories about folks who have been through hell and kept going... Fascinating." —Glennon Doyle, A Favorite Book of 2020 on Good Morning America

"Gildiner is nothing short of masterful—as both a therapist and writer. In these pages, she has gorgeously captured both the privilege of being given access to the inner chambers of people's lives, and the meaning that comes from watching them grow into the selves they were meant to be." —Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

In this fascinating narrative, therapist Catherine Gildiner’s presents five of what she calls her most heroic and memorable patients. Among them: a successful, first generation Chinese immigrant musician suffering sexual dysfunction; a young woman whose father abandoned her at age nine with her younger siblings in an isolated cottage in the depth of winter; and a glamorous workaholic whose narcissistic, negligent mother greeted her each morning of her childhood with "Good morning, Monster."

Each patient presents a mystery, one that will only be unpacked over years. They seek Gildiner's help to overcome an immediate challenge in their lives, but discover that the source of their suffering has been long buried.

As in such recent classics as The Glass Castle and Educated, each patient embodies self-reflection, stoicism, perseverance, and forgiveness as they work unflinchingly to face the truth. Gildiner's account of her journeys with them is moving, insightful, and sometimes very funny. Good Morning Monster offers an almost novelistic, behind-the-scenes look into the therapist's office, illustrating how the process can heal even the most unimaginable wounds.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250271488
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/22/2020
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	669,204
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

CATHERINE GILDINER was a clinical psychologist in private practice for twenty-five years. Her best-selling memoir Too Close to The Falls was published to international acclaim. She lives in Toronto.

Editorial Reviews

07/06/2020

Clinical psychologist Gildiner (Too Close to the Falls) shares heart-wrenching stories of child abuse in this pull-no-punches narrative about five of her patients. Of them, nine-year-old Laura was abandoned by her sociopathic father in a Canadian winter and left to raise her younger siblings; Peter was locked away in an attic by his mother until his fifth birthday and terrorized by her thereafter, leading to impotence and the inability to have a normal romantic relationship; Alana’s father began raping her at the age of four and forced her to have sex with his friends, causing dissociative identity disorder; Danny was stripped of his Cree heritage and endured sexual assault by priests at a state-run school; and Madeline was a brittle workaholic whose verbally and emotionally abusive mother conditioned her to believe she has no worth and is a “monster.” While each patient first comes to Gildiner with an immediate health concern, they all find healing by opening up, delving into their past to uncover former traumas, and finding forgiveness for those who have caused them harm. These painful accounts will break anyone’s heart, and also inspire awe for the ways people who suffered horrific abuse were able to find a measure of recovery. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Catherine Gildiner is nothing short of masterful—as both a therapist and writer. In these pages, she has gorgeously captured both the privilege of being given access to the inner chambers of people's lives, and the meaning that comes from watching them grow into the selves they were meant to be. Heartbreaking, surprising, inspiring, and profound, this is ultimately a book about the power of connection and the triumph of the human spirit." —Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and our Lives Revealed

“Enthusiastic and insightful” —Toronto Star

“Like Oliver Sacks, Catherine Gildiner loves her patients... Gildiner is a master of shoot-from-the-hip nonfiction—funny, direct and honest about what she sees in others and what she sees in herself. Highly readable!” —Susan Swan, author of The Wives of Bath

“This is a compelling and compressed journey through years of psychotherapy for each of these five people, with crystalline moments of connection and meaning… Gildiner is astute, active, pragmatic, and hopeful. She is also very funny. Her wit and her wisdom are gifts shared with these five people—and now with all of us readers. —David S. Goldbloom, co-author of How Can I Help?: A week in My Life as a Psychiatrist

“These stories are almost mythic in their power... I couldn’t put this book down.” —Antanas Sileika, author of Provisionally Yours

“Compelling, heart-in-throat stories prove no one is ‘damaged goods.’ I’m in awe of the five patients and of Gildiner’s exceptional creativity as she guides each one toward emotional freedom.” —Rona Maynard, author of My Mother’s Daughter

From the Publisher

2020-08-26
A Toronto-based clinical psychologist weighs the travails of mental illness on both sufferer and healer.

In addition to patient stories, Gildiner also recounts instances of her own Type A behavior, which leads to the tendency “to mow others down while driving toward our own ambitions.” In one case, she took a patient, to use her apt metaphor, above the depths of the unconscious so quickly that the result was akin to “psychological bends.” The power of the therapist can breed complacency, she notes, and, combined with years of experience, the feeling that one has seen it all. In Gildiner’s case, she certainly had not, and her book is full of self-discovery. One of the most affecting sections of her five-part case study concerns a Cree man who had weathered the death of a child, physical and sexual abuse, and depression. He also suffered from what she calls the “multigenerational trauma” of similar losses, a trauma resistant to treatment by psychotherapy, which “wasn’t designed to deal with cultural annihilation.” Another patient suffers not from multiple personality, as the common trope has it, but instead from dissociative identity, which “means that a fragmentation of the main personality has occurred.” Given that fragmentation refers to bits and pieces of missing psychological skills, it’s a wonder all of us don’t merit the diagnosis. In another instance, a woman was told daily by her grudging mother that she was a monster, “spoiled, grumpy, lazy, and fat,” when in fact she was none of those things. The brainwashing is just that practiced by narcissists at all levels—a valuable lesson for all readers, given how exposed we are to narcissists these days. Overcoming fear is no easy thing, writes the author, and her five patients as well as her own therapy lead her to the pointed conclusion that “all self-examination is brave."

Insightful psychological lessons of special interest to readers on therapeutic journeys of their own.

Kirkus Reviews